Chapter XX. Atlantis
Under the Sargasso Sea, if a few accomplished thinkers, a somewhat larger number of speculative scientists, and a host of dreamers are right, lies the lost Atlantis. This legend of a continent beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which reached a high level of civilization, extended its rule along both shores of the Mediterranean, sent its armies to battle with Egypt and Athens, and “in a day and a fatal night” sank beneath the sea eleven thousand years ago, is the most haunting and poignant thing that has come down from antiquity.
The story derives from Plato, who attributes it to his relative, Solon, who had it from a priest of Egypt. It is told briefly and completely in the Timæus and with much greater detail in the Critias; unfortunately, the latter portion of this work is wanting and the narrative ends abruptly, before recounting the cataclysm outlined in the earlier work. Both are built upon the conversation between Solon and the Egyptian priest. Discoursing on the ignorance of the Greeks concerning their own history, the priest said that they knew nothing of a thing which was preserved in the sacred books of the temple at Sais—that, nine thousand years before, the Athenians had repelled an invading force which threatened the conquest of Europe and Asia. This force had come in through the Straits of Gibraltar from the Atlantic Sea, “which was at that time navigable.”
Beyond the Straits, according to the Timæus, lay the island of Atlantis, greater than Libya and Asia (Minor) together. Other islands surrounded it, and farther west was a continent. Between Atlantis and this continent rolled an ocean so great that, compared with it, the land-locked Mediterranean was merely a harbor. A powerful dynasty of kings arose on the island, subjugated the surrounding archipelagoes and a part of the unnamed continent beyond, and in the Old World swayed Libya up to Egypt and the northern shore of the Mediterranean as far as Tuscany. They undertook to complete their conquest of the Mediterranean coasts, but the Athenians, though deserted by their allies, beat off their ships. While the fleet from beyond the Straits was still in the Inland Sea, it would seem, the island of Atlantis was sunk, and the earthquakes that submerged it and the monstrous waves that followed spread ruin all along the Mediterranean shores.
Here is the passage in which Plato records the concluding words of the priest of Solon: “But after (the battle) there occurred violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of rain all your warlike men in a body sunk into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared and was sunk beneath the sea. And that is the reason why the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is such a quantity of shallow mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.... There are remaining in small islets only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called, all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the country being left.”
The longer account in the Critias describes the civilization of Atlantis. It begins, as all chronicles used to do, with the affairs of the gods, and their amorous interest in the daughters of men (Gen. vi: 2). The sea god Poseidon fell in love with Cleito, a mortal island maiden, and she bore him five sets of twins. The ten sons became kings, each ruler of a tenth part of Atlantis, but all subject to the eldest son, Atlas. The capital of the island became his abode, as it had been his mother’s before him. Poseidon himself had laid out the palace compound, making alternate zones of sea and land; “there were two of land and three of water which he turned as with a lathe out of the center of the island.”
At this point in the account, the divine figures disappear and it becomes seemingly a straight historical narrative. Its picture of the capital is more exact in its topographical, architectural, and engineering detail than many that have come down to us of the older capitals of Asia, or than any biblical picture of Jerusalem. The laws, religion, and arts of the people are all adequately noticed.
There was a barrier of lofty mountains around the shores of the island, their flanks sloping precipitously to the sea. In the upland valleys were rich and populous villages. The middle of the island was a great and fertile plain surrounded by a ditch one hundred feet deep. Abundant rivers coursed the plain and the moisture of the rainy season was supplemented in the summer by a system of aqueducts. In the center of the plain was a magnificent city.
Assuming that this is no dream geography, it is necessary to determine the size of Atlantis, and in doing so to reconcile a conflict of statements in Plato’s story. He speaks of it as a large island, though small as compared with a land domain west of it, which “may be most truly called a continent”; yet he says Atlantis was larger than Libya and Asia combined. The tale becomes incredible if Libya receives its common Greek extension as the whole of Africa, and if Asia is taken in the larger sense; for such an island there would not be room in the Atlantic. The passage is brought into harmony with the context if other ancient definitions are followed, so that Libya is made to mean the district immediately west of Egypt and Asia to mean Asia Minor. This would give the legendary Atlantis a territory of perhaps three hundred thousand square miles, or about twice that of the state of California.
There are precise figures for the great central plain and they harmonize with such an estimate of the island area. The plain was three hundred and forty miles long by two hundred and thirty wide—in other words, exactly the size of the state of Washington, but with its greater dimension from south to north. The topography of the whole island suggests that of California, although its shape was more compact. Its central plain lay within its mountain barriers as the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys lie between the Sierras and the Coast Range. And in its mineral riches, its mild climate, its system of irrigation, and in the products of its fields, orchards, and vineyards it was very like the Pacific coast state.
“Whatever fragrant things there are in the earth,” says Plato, “whether roots or herbage or woods, grew and thrived in that land.” He mentions melons—“fruits with a hard rind”—chestnuts, and “the pleasant kinds of dessert which console us after dinner when we are full and tired of eating,” which may mean, among other things, grapes and oranges; and all these “the sacred island lying beneath the sun brought forth fair and wondrous in infinite abundance.” In this picture there is but one unfamiliar figure. Herds of elephants roved there, where California can show only the fossil remains of the mastodon.
In the account of the capital city it is illuminating to recur to the Pacific state, for the metropolis of Atlantis lay in the midst of a mountain-girdled plain, and yet, like Sacramento, had access to the sea, in this case by a ship canal perhaps connecting with a river. If one can imagine the buildings and grounds of the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 with the wharves and commerce of San Francisco removed to Sacramento, one may glimpse the legendary metropolis. In the center of the city, on an artificial island, were temples and palaces like those of the exposition, but of a barbaric splendor. Greatest of these was the temple to Poseidon, a structure about as large as one of the palaces surrounding the Court of the Universe at the exposition, and doubtless of no greater height, for this was a region of earthquake, and within the temple was one statue that reached quite to the roof. Its walls were silvered, with gilded pinnacles, and under the ivory roof the interior blazed with gold and silver and “orichalcum”—copper, or an alloy of it, and esteemed next to gold.
The wall that encircled this inner island or citadel “flashed with the red light of orichalcum.” There was a broad canal around it, and then an encircling zone of land, about which was a wall sheeted with tin. Around this was still another canal encircled by another land zone, and here was a wall coated with brass, beside which ran a racecourse two hundred yards wide where horses contended. Encircling this again was the outermost canal. Beyond it lay the city.
The buildings of the outer city, as well as those of its sacred citadel, were of stones in three colors—white, black and red—which, with all the minerals useful to man, were taken from the bosom of the island. There were hot and cold springs, with baths and with pools for horses and cattle; the surplus water was conveyed by aqueducts to the grove of Poseidon. Around the harbor front were docks, triremes, and naval stores. Back of them the plain was densely crowded with habitations. The harbors were full of vessels, and merchants coming from all parts who from their numbers kept up “a multitudinous sound of human voices and din of all sorts night and day.”
A copper column stood in the temple of Poseidon, on which the laws of the land were graven. The chief of these were that the people should not take up arms against one another, and that they should all come to the rescue if anyone in any city attempted to overthrow the royal house. On the plain and in the populous mountain valleys there was a system of military service by districts and chiefs of districts, somewhat like that of ancient Peru; and when Atlantis went to war ten thousand chariots moved in front of its armies, and twelve hundred vessels swept the sea lanes east and west. It was a powerful nation and a happy—so long as the divine nature of their founder retained its force among the people. Says Plato:
“They despised everything but virtue, not caring for their present state of life and thinking lightly on the possession of gold and other property which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtuous friendship with one another, and that by excessive zeal for them, and honor of them, the good of them is lost and friendship perishes with them.”
At length, however, the divine nature in the Atlantines became diluted by mortal admixture. They were filled with avarice, pride, the lusts of the flesh; and “the fairest of their precious gifts” departed from them. Base to men of insight, they still appeared to others as glorious and blessed. In order to effect their chastisement and correction, says Plato, returning to the mythological vein, a council of the gods was called, and Zeus “spoke as follows.” What the Olympian said will never be known, for here the Critias ends, and for the fate of the Atlantines one must recur to the Timæus.
The mythical prologue and epilogue excepted, the whole account reads as if the author believed it himself. It is singularly free from fantasy—this is no Cloud-Cuckoo Land of an Aristophanes. The transcriber of the legend was perhaps the largest mind of antiquity and a man of unblemished character; and “strange but altogether true” he calls his own story. He was, however, a constructive dreamer, and in his Republic he has given a detailed sketch of an ideal state. Was this another essay of a like nature? Might not the narrative carry further if it came from a man of less imaginative sweep—from the contemporary Xenophon, or from Plutarch, both of them vivacious chroniclers with their eyes on facts? Phædrus had said to Socrates, “You can easily invent a tale of Egypt.” Has the great disciple of Socrates done this?
These questions are asked still, and antiquity asked them. Proclus in his commentary on the Timæus assumed that the legend was a symbol of the contest between the primeval forces and the spirit of art and science; he recites that Crantor, the first commentator, accepted it as literal history and was ridiculed for it. Strabo and Pliny barely mention the story. Thus Plutarch sets down the circumstances of its relation: “Solon attempted in verse a large description, or rather fabulous account of the Atlantic Island, which he had learned from the wise men of Sais; but by reason of his age he did not go through with it. Plato laid out magnificent courts and inclosures, and erected a grand entrance to it, such as no other story, fable, or poem ever had. But he began it late, he ended his life before the work, so that the more the reader is delighted with the part that is written, the more regret he has to find it unfinished.”
There is evidence that at any rate the legend is not an invention of Plato. It was claimed by Plato himself that the victory of the Athenians over the Atlantines was depicted on one of the ceremonial tunics which were borne in the midsummer festival of the Panathenæa. Diodorus has a reference to this war. Ælian says that Theopompus heard a similar story in Phrygia, in which, however, the island was called Meropis. Proclus quotes from the Æthiopica of Marcellus a tale of ten islands in the outer sea, the inhabitants of which preserved the memory of a large island that had ruled over the archipelago and was sacred to Poseidon.
The following are the main explanations, ancient and modern, of the legend: 1. Atlantis was no island, but a part of either Europe or Africa—the Iberian peninsula, or Senegal, for example—so remote from Egypt as to seem an island to mariners who reached it after beating about beyond the Straits. 2. Atlantis was Minoan Crete, resembling Plato’s island in its configuration if not in its site; the ancient Cretan civilization was destroyed about B.C. 1500, almost as completely as if by a submergence in the sea. 3. “Atlantis is too obviously an earlier and equally colossal Persia, western instead of eastern.” 4. Atlantis is pure fiction, arising, like the tales of Homer and Hesiod, in the belief that the abodes of the heroes were in the extreme west. 5. Atlantis is a variant of the old tradition of a Golden Age. 6. Atlantis and the Fortunate Islands and the Azores are one, but tradition placed them too near the Straits, and the legend of a great sunken island arose when no land was found where people thought land should be. 7. Atlantis is another form of the solar myth—the setting of the sun in the red ruin of evening, and the coming of dark upon the deep. 8. Atlantis and the Republic are companion realms, the one no less imaginary than the other, and each intended to illustrate Plato’s conception of ideal polity.
These are the conjectures of a skepticism which properly refuses to believe that so great a thing has happened and left such slight traces in monuments or in tradition. Yet there are some details in Plato’s story not so easily disposed of, and they appear more distinctly when Atlantis itself is erased from it. These are the islands on both sides of the legendary continent, the impassable sea that covers its site, the great ocean beyond it, and the continent in the west which hems in that ocean. None of these things the men of Plato’s time knew of, but, to give them their modern names, they seem to be Madeira, the Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores on the one side of the Sargasso Sea, the West Indies on the other, the Sargasso Sea itself, the open Atlantic, and the American continent.
If the classic world had few and faint traditions of a sunken continent and ignored them or dismissed them as idle tales, it had one overmastering feeling that could not be called a superstition because it never took a tangible form. The feeling was a blind terror of the Atlantic Ocean, as if something dreadful had happened there, but so long before that nobody knew what it was.
Nothing has developed in Europe itself that makes Plato’s story of a lost continent a whit more probable or less plausible than it was when he wrote it; but there have been contributions to the legend from the ocean floor and from the New World. The variations, and in a measure the shifts, of opinion on the Atlantis story in the last hundred years are represented by three names—Humboldt, Ignatius Donnelly, and Pierre Termier. Writing in 1826, the German savant noted evidences of an external influence in the historical monuments of Central America. In his book, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Donnelly boldly contended that a continent had disappeared in the mid-Atlantic, that this sunken domain had been the cradle of civilization, and that the widespread traditions of a deluge were race memories of its disappearance. This writer’s identification with the Baconian cipher theory, and his espousal of fanciful beliefs and lost causes, political or other, together with his credulity and his snap judgments, obscured the industry, the wide range of information, and the real gift of generalization to which his book bore witness. It came with something like a shock to the scientific world when the French scholar, Prof. Pierre Termier, Director of the Geological Survey of France, read his paper on Atlantis before the Oceanographic Institute of France in 1912. This was published at Monaco in the Bulletin of the Institute of Oceanography in 1913, and a translation, included in the annual report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1915, provoked a discussion among geographers in America that continued for several years.
“It seems more and more evident,” concluded Termier, “that a vast region, continental or made up of great islands, has collapsed west of the Pillars of Hercules, and that its collapse occurred in the not distant past.”
In support of this inference Termier arrays the evidence of the Atlantic’s surface and of the floor which its waters conceal. A ship sailing due west from the Straits of Gibraltar four thousand miles to Cape Hatteras would meet with no land. But if it lengthened its course a little by making a detour, first toward the southwest, then toward the northwest, then again toward the southwest, it would bring in view Madeira, the more southern Azores, and the Bermudas. And if it took soundings it would discover that, the marine depths over which it was passing were strangely unequal. If the ocean were drained dry, what would be seen would be a long elevated region lying between the Old and New Worlds, separated from both by two enormous valleys, the wider and deeper one on the American side. This is the revelation of oceanography—a hidden continent in the Atlantic basin with the islands named above as its mountain peaks.
Geology adds that the eastern region of the Atlantic over all its length and probably from pole to pole is a great volcanic zone. “Everywhere,” says the French geologist, “earthquakes are frequent, here and there islets may spring up abruptly from the sea, or rocks long known may disappear.” The ocean may conceal the continuity of these changes, but to geological science they are incontestable and they affect a zone which reaches from Iceland to the Cape Verde Islands and is about 1,875 miles broad.
When a ship was laying the cable between Brest and Cape Cod in 1898, the cable broke and was recovered by grappling. The grappling irons encountered various submerged rocks with hard points and sharp edges, and brought to the surface fragments of the vitreous lava called tachylyte. These “precious fragments,” as Termier calls them, are in the Museum of the School of Mines in Paris. The significance of their structure is that if they had solidified under water they would have been composed of confused crystals. In the form in which they were found they must have cooled when they were still above the sea’s surface. The sharp edges of the marine rocks, whence these fragments came, argue that the region collapsed suddenly and recently. Had they remained after the volcanic disturbance a long time above the sea, they would have been smoothed by atmospheric erosion. Had they been a long time under the sea, they would have been smoothed by marine abrasion. The inference is that “the entire region north of the Azores and perhaps the very region of the Azores, of which they may be only the visible ruins, was very recently submerged, probably during the epoch which the geologists call the present, because it is so recent, and which for us, the living beings of to-day, is the same as yesterday.”
The evidence of zoölogy has been arrayed by another French scholar, M. Louis Germain, briefly as follows: The present fauna of the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde Islands originated in Africa; the Quaternary formations of the Canaries resemble those of Mauretania and inclose the same species of mollusca. Therefore these archipelagoes were connected with Africa up to an epoch near our own, at the very least until toward the end of the Tertiary. Among the present mollusca of the archipelagoes are some species which seem to be survivors of the European Tertiary. Therefore there was a bond between the islands and Spain which was severed during the Pliocene. The Pulmonata mollusca, called oleacinidæ, are found only in Central America, the West Indies, the Mediterranean Basin, and the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores, and are larger in America than in these other regions. Therefore the continent which included these islands had extended to the West Indies at the beginning of the Miocene, but had been separated from them during the Miocene. Fifteen species of marine mollusca lived at the same time both in the West Indies and on the coast of Senegal, and nowhere else. Therefore until very near the present time a maritime shore extended from the West Indies to Senegal.
The arguments of geology and zoölogy may be combined. Termier is of those geologists who believe the ancient alignment of continents was east and west instead of north and south. There was a North Atlantic continent comprising Russia, Scandinavia, Great Britain, Greenland and Canada, and later a large part of central and western Europe and of the United States. There was also a South Atlantic or African-Brazilian continent extending northward to the Atlas, eastward to the Persian Gulf, westward to the Andes. Between the two continents was the Mediterranean depression, the ancient maritime furrow still marked in the present Mediterranean and Caribbean seas. These continents were broken up by foldings and collapses and a new design appeared, the general direction of which is from north to south.
M. Germain, confining himself mainly to the middle region between these two supposed continental areas, infers the existence of an Atlantic continent connected with Spain and Morocco and prolonging itself so far south as to take in regions of desert climate. During the Miocene this continent reaches the West Indies. It is then broken up and portioned off, at first in the direction of the West Indies; then in the south, by the establishment of a marine shore which reaches Senegal; then in the east, probably during the Pliocene, along the coast of Africa. “The last great fragment, finally engulfed and no longer having left any further vestiges than the four archipelagoes, would be the Atlantis of Plato,” says Termier, himself reviewing the conclusions of Germain.
Thus the geological and zoölogical arguments correspond very closely. To Termier there is no doubt at all that until an epoch near our own there was a continental domain in the Atlantic west of the Pillars of Hercules, and that it was sunk in a cataclysm. There is only one question left: “Did men then live who could withstand the reaction and transmit the memory of it?” Geology and zoölogy have perhaps told all they could tell by way of answer. “It is from anthropology, from ethnography, and lastly from oceanography,” says Termier, “that I am now awaiting the final answer.”
Anthropology and ethnography have provided some hints, such as they are. Men of scientific or of speculative cast have noted cranial and other correspondences in the subtropics on both sides of the Atlantic, and what seemed to be African influences in the civilizations of Central and South America. Quatrefages named five races of American Indians which seemed to him “true negroes.” Le Plongeon remarked the thick lips and woolly hair of certain sculptured figures at Chichen Itza. Retzius thought there were the same form of skull and the same reddish-brown complexion in the Carib Islands and in the Canaries. Elephant heads with trunk and tusks have been discovered in the friezes of ruined temples in Yucatan. Wiener contends, on the evidence of philology, that yams, manioc, peanuts and tobacco came to America from Africa before Columbus rather than went out from America afterward.
In ancient times the people of the Old World and the New were in contact. The belief has been that this was across the Pacific, but the traditions of Mexico and its neighbors point in a different direction.
Two dominant notes are struck in the legends of the races fronting on the Caribbean. One is the belief that civilization was brought to them by white, bearded strangers who came over the sea from the east. The other is the tradition of a deluge or related cataclysm. And sometimes the two stories are grouped; the beneficent strangers are refugees from the disastrous something that had happened upon the sea. Cataclysm has been called the pivot of Central American myth and the basis of the Mexican calendar.
The legendary founder of the oldest Mexican civilization, the Toltec, was Quetzalcoatl, who was worshiped as a god, but was reputed to have been a bearded white man who came from the east with a band of colonists and instructed the natives in the arts and sciences; his symbol was a boat. The story was that he was driven out by the witch doctors, but promised to return. Aztec belief that the Cortes expedition was the return visit made easier the Spanish conquest. Among the Mayas the divine stranger was known as Kukulcan, and his title was Lord of the Hollow Tree (the ark?). Coming from “Valum Chvim,” he founded the ancient city of Palenque. His company was described as wearing black mantles with short sleeves; the Mayas called them “men with petticoats.”
Native legends of tropic America, some of which Spence has marshaled, present a panorama of flood, fire, hilltops of refuge, arks, survivors. According to the Arawaks of Guiana the world was smitten by fire, from which men hid themselves in caverns; and then by flood, from which a leader and his followers saved themselves in canoes. In the Carib deluge myth men escaped to the mountain tops. In the Tupi-Guarani myth the Creator scourged the world with fire but a great magician put it out with a rainstorm and men took to trees (boats?). In the Karaya myth an evil spirit invoked the deluge and sent fish to pull the survivors down from the hill Tupimare. Various hills in Mexico and the American southwest are pointed out as the Ararats of flood refugees. There is even an account in the Nahuatl language of the building of an ark. According to early Spanish writers there were similar stories of oceanic upheaval among the natives of the Antilles.
All the New World flood myths, the Chaldean, Aramæan, and Iranian, the Hebrew story of Noah, and the Greek story of Deucalion, as well as the indicated ending of Plato’s tale of Atlantis, agree in their main lines—that a malevolent spirit sought to drown all men, or that an angered divinity sought by a deluge to punish their lusts and pride, and that a few righteous or lucky men escaped. One of these stories, recited in the sacred book of the Quiche Indians of Guatemala, was believed by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg to be an account of the disaster to Atlantis. As the briefest of the flood myths, and not the worst, it may be repeated:
“They did not think or speak of the Creator who had created them, and who had caused their birth. They were drowned, and thick resin fell from heaven.
“The bird Xecotcovach tore out their eyes; the bird Camulatz cut off their heads; the bird Cotzbalam devoured their flesh; the bird Tecumbalam broke their bones and sinews and ground them into powder.
“Because they had not thought of their mother and father, the Heart of Heaven whose name is Hurakan, therefore the face of the earth grew dark and a pouring rain commenced, raining by day, raining by night.
“Then all sorts of beings, little and great, gathered together to abuse the men to their faces; and all spoke, their millstones, their plates, their cups, their dogs, their hens,” denouncing them and railing at them.
These traditions of disaster, survival, and immigration are the collateral support of native American myth to Plato’s narrative of Atlantis. The monumental ruins of Central America yield some evidence which in no wise confirms the traditions, but into which they fit. The Maya civilization has been described as immigrant from a region unknown. Its palaces and temples and columns, and the figures and inscriptions upon them, represent an art that seemingly had reached its maturity when the earliest of them was made. There are no local evidences of the slow evolution of skill and taste, such as would be expected in an indigenous culture. The resemblances to the monuments of Burmah and Siam are superficial. The evidences of a European influence are practically nil. The indications of a civilization remarkable along certain lines are convincing; the Mexican calendar, the Maya astronomy, betray a knowledge of the movements of the heavenly bodies which was equal to that of Europe in the Columbian period, and yet independent of it.
The Maya monuments have one singularity which has challenged speculation. “It has been found,” says Spence, “that the starting point of all the dates found on the monuments, save two, is the same. Thus all Maya reckoning dates from one definite day in the past, a day 3,000 years prior to the first date in Maya history which can be described as contemporary with the monument upon which it is found. Upon this practically all Maya scholars of repute are agreed.” It has been conjectured that this normal date of the Mayas is the date of a cataclysm, somewhat as the people of San Francisco, with the memory of their earthquake and conflagration strong in them, date many events in their conversation as since the Fire. It has also been conjectured that this date, and a developed civilization, were brought to the Mayas by the survivors of the cataclysm.
Such is the case for Atlantis as it has been made up by men with some rank as students or specialists. The bold guesses of Donnelly, from whose work several of these citations have been taken, must be added. His most interesting contention, perhaps, is that the Bronze Age in Europe must have been preceded by a Copper Age, since bronze is an alloy of copper and tin; but that there is no evidence of a Copper Age in Europe. There was, however, a Copper Age in America, from Bolivia to Lake Superior, and therefore Atlantis was the bridge between the Copper Age of America and the Bronze Age of Europe.
With a characteristic sweep of statement Donnelly announces his conclusions. The people of Atlantis “were the founders of nearly all our arts and sciences; they were the parents of our fundamental beliefs; they were the first civilizers, the first navigators, the first merchants, the first colonizers of the earth; their civilization was old when Egypt was young, and they had passed away thousands of years before Babylon, Rome, or London was dreamed of. This lost people were our ancestors, their blood flows in our veins; the words we use every day were heard, in the primitive form, in their cities, courts, temples. Every line of race and thought, of blood and belief, leads back to them.”
For every fact, tradition, or coincidence which seems to point toward the disappearance of a continent in the Atlantic sea, there are other explanations with authoritative names behind them. The old dread of the Western Ocean is attributed to the teaching of primitive religions that there was the land of shades, and to the colossal trickery of Phœnician mariners who wanted no competitors beyond the Pillars. The American legends of bright-faced strangers coming over the water from the east are declared to be still another form of the sun myth. The world-wide tradition of a deluge may represent the independent thinking of various races of men who found fossil shells on their hillsides and reasoned that at some time a sea had covered them. It is asserted that Termier assumed too much for his specific evidence of a recent submersion—the fragments of tachylyte dredged from the ocean floor—when he declared that vitreous lava could not form under the sea. Accepting, as many geographers do, that a great land domain has sunk near the coast of Africa, they say that this was not a historic, nor a prehistoric, but a geologic event.
The controversy reduces itself, at last, to a question of time: Did the large island which Plato called Atlantis disappear after men came upon the earth? Termier does not assert this, but thinks it possible, and in some measure the wish is father to the thought. As an American geographer puts it, “It is well known that Professor Termier is not only a good geologist, but also a great lover of the beautiful and much given to the poetic in speaking and writing.” This passage in the Termier address is in point:
“Meanwhile not only will science, most modern science, not make it a crime for all lovers of beautiful legends to believe in Plato’s story of Atlantis, but science herself through my voice calls their attention to it. Science herself, taking them by the hand and leading them along the wreck-strewn ocean shores, spreads before their eyes, with thousands of disabled ships, the continents submerged or reduced to remnants, and the isles without number enshrouded in the abyss.”
Beyond the appeal to poetry the Atlantis legend has another—an appeal which is also a temptation. It explains much, perhaps too much. There are gaps in the story of human origins, and in the history of the arts and sciences, that are as wide as the black voids the astronomer sees in the skies. Atlantis fills them all. Science has sought to fill them by assumptions—the origin of man in a drowned continent of the Pacific called Lemuria, of which Australia is a fragment; the origin of civilization on the Mediterranean floor when it was dry land. These are assumptions without a tradition behind them. Paradoxically enough, the point of attack upon the Atlantis theory is that a legend supports it, and other legends fit into it. The whole matches into an ingenious and simple design, and are the affairs of nature and man ever so simple?
It is not for anyone to answer yet, perhaps ever. But one has license from Termier to speculate, and, if one will, to dream. If in substance Plato’s tale was true, it needs no effort of imagination to picture the empire of Atlantis as it was eleven thousand years ago, for all its drama save the dreadful end has been repeated. The British Isles, with their sea-borne commerce, their Mediterranean and Caribbean garrisons, their mines and metal workings, their ancient Druidical religion and costume, even their addiction to horse-racing, reproduce in the northern seas the story of this vanished island dominion south and west of Gibraltar.
The outlines of the crowning calamity of history—if history it was—have already been drawn by legend, and there are authentic human experiences on a lesser scale, and in other times and places, to fill in the canvas. In the European port nearest the supposed site of Atlantis, on the first day of November, 1775, a sound of thunder was heard underground, and in an earthquake that shook twelve million miles of sea and land the city of Lisbon fell in ruins, burying sixty thousand persons beneath it.
“About one o’clock in the afternoon”—it is Pliny the Younger speaking, the place is near Pompeii, and the time August 24th, A.D. 79—“a vast and singular cloud was seen to elevate itself in the atmosphere. It spread horizontally, in form like the branches of the pine, and precipitated the burning materials with which it was charged upon the many lovely but ill-fated villages which stood upon this delightful coast.... Multitudes crowded toward the beach, but the boisterous agitation of the sea, alternately rolling on the shore and thrown back by the convulsive motion of the earth, precluded every possibility of escape.... Now were heard the shrieks of women, screams of children, clamors of men, all accursing their fate and imploring death, the deliverance they feared, with outstretched hands to the gods whom many thought about to be involved together with themselves in the last eternal night.”
Let the biblical account of the deluge speak the closing word upon Atlantis: “And all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered, and the waters prevailed upon the earth.”
One turns from the convulsion and welter of the deep, and the beautiful and dreadful thing that lay beneath it, and fixes the gaze on archaic ships, laden with strangely robed men and women, riding the long billows of the Caribbean toward a quiet shore. There—if the dreamers are right—they built another civilization, which flourished and in turn vanished, with its temples and palaces, beneath the green mantle of the tropic forest. If the dreamers are right.